Have Your Conversion Funnel Cake and Optimize It Too

Funnel cake is a delicious summer treat and may not have much to do with ecommerce, but your conversion funnel certainly does. If you're stuck in an ecommerce rut and don't know what to do, don't worry; you can continue to use aspects of your funnel as they currently stand and test different versions of landing pages, shopping carts, checkout processes, etc. using A/B testing.

Funnel cake is a delicious summer treat and may not have much to do with ecommerce, but your conversion funnel certainly does. If you’re stuck in an ecommerce rut and don’t know what to do, don’t worry; you can continue to use aspects of your funnel as they currently stand and test different versions of landing pages, shopping carts, checkout processes, etc. using A/B testing. Your prospects’ paths to purchase down your conversion funnel consist of many potential points of contact and interaction with your brand, and fortunately, you can make an immediate impact at a lot of these points by making simple changes and constantly experimenting and analyzing.

When it comes to ecommerce measurement, whether you’re merely trying to benchmark your performance against your industry, identify and capitalize on cross-shopping behavior (shared traffic among your competitors), develop an understanding of customer loyalty vs. new acquisition, or maximize your conversion rate to most directly impact your bottom line, you should always be experimenting. The resources you have will determine how many tests you can run at once and how frequently you can run them, but if it’s not already, experimentation needs to be a top priority for you and your organization. According to an ecommerce experiment featured on WhichTestWon.com, as simple a change as testing a price guarantee against a brand authentication element resulted in 107% increase in ecommerce sales for one online retailer.

Testing doesn’t need to be complicated, it can be as easy as changing the color of a button or removing a step in the checkout process. You will be surprised at the impact a little experimentation can have on important website metrics like checkout start rate, conversion rate, bounce rate, and loyalty metrics like new vs. returning customers. Remember that it’s important to choose which metrics your business needs to focus on and set goals for how much you want to improve your performance. Testing blindly and without a plan in mind is almost worse than not testing at all because you won’t be able to learn from your results.

Are you currently optimizing your conversion funnel? Does your organization support a culture of constant experimentation?

About Jared DeLuca:Jared is currently the Digital Marketing Manager at Millward Brown Digital. He is a graduate of Northeastern University, having achieved his B.A. in Communication Studies. If you like what you read, you can connect with him on Google+, Twitter, or on LinkedIn.